Video conferencing may require a substantial amount of data to be streamed or otherwise communicated across communications networks. Media gateways may be employed in such networks to transcode media streams between different telecommunication systems. A conventional system may utilize centralized media gateway architecture in which traffic across a network may be concentrated through one gateway. For example, a multi-point control unit (MCU) may be used to bridge video conferencing connections, wherein conference streams may be distributed to multiple endpoints over an internet protocol (IP) network. An MCU may also apply media processing techniques, such as digital signal processing, to perform compression/decompression and encoding/decoding of video or audio streams.
However, the centralized approach of existing gateways may be limited in that a video conference may only use media processing resources local to an MCU. Media processing resources may not be shared across networks with a central gateway, and there may be no local resources available for remote endpoints. In order to send traffic from an endpoint in a conference, an MCU may also be required to directly send a copy of the data to all of the other endpoints over an IP network. Furthermore, this may increase traffic in a bandwidth limited environment such as a wide area network (WAN), wherein multiple computer networking architectures transmit data over broad ranges of distances. Therefore, there is a need to enhance video conferencing architecture in order to accommodate a greater number of users in a bandwidth restricted network while maintaining quality of service.